Aims High and Misses  But Only a Little

Rating: 7/10 (2 January 2006)

They bend lots of sheet metal, shatter lots of glass, and generally blow crap up in this one. However the writers were clearly trying for more than just an action flick. The action they got; the moral dilemma and the scientific speculation fall short in several areas.
If you have to struggle at all with the right-or-wrongness of the idea that cloned humans have no rights and can be chopped up for spare body parts at the will of their "sponsors," then you have to be considered beyond this discussion. Go ahead and enjoy the movie; it will look to you like a futuristic "Die Hard." The bad guy does his best to present the devil's case here  that cloned humans are cattle because they wouldn't exist otherwise. But the arguments are so weak even his hired guns don't buy it. What should have been explored was the moral culpability of the huge number of people who were in on it, but without time in the screenplay it is boiled down to the single line "humans will do anything to survive." The creamy Scarlett Johansson is heartbreakingly attractive, only slightly less pretty than her leading man Ewan McGregor. Although their characters they look like adults they are actually 4 and 3 years old, respectively, and educated to "the level of a 15 year old." As a mere footnote to the story, somehow Lincoln Six Echo (McGregor's character) not only starts behaving beyond his environmental programming, but somehow acquiring the memories of the man he was cloned from. This could be built into a profound theological and legal question, but instead it is merely used to help Lincoln Six Echo operate in the outside world.
What is left is still quite elaborate and interesting; just don't expect too much.